Centive Compel has again been selected by companies that previously had deployed sales compensation management solutions from other vendors.

Over the past three years, Compel has displaced other commercial solutions at several companies. Most recently, WageWorks and SkillSoft have selected Compel as their new sales compensation/sales performance management solution.

Compel offers several key differentiators over other solutions that prove, time and again, to offer material benefits for our customers. A partial list of differentiators includes:

• One Solution - Compel is a complete solution for modeling, managing, reporting, paying and analyzing sales compensation. Other solutions require the purchase of separate modules to offer similar levels of functionality.
• Effective Dating - Compel is the only solution to offer effective dating throughout the application, including plans, crediting rules, quotas, territories, transactions, organizational hierarchies and people information. Without effective dating of all elements, prior period adjustments cannot be accurately managed, nor can reports accurately reflect history over time.
• Business User Self Service - With Compel, business users in sales and finance can manage sales compensation without the need for help from IT or their solution vendor. Competitive systems require support for standard activities like building reports or modeling plans.

 

To learn more about Compel, visit www.centive.com/products/compel or click on the links below.

(Article reproduced from Topline Sales Compensation's July Newsletter)

Recent surveys reveal that almost 95% of companies expect to change their sales compensation plans each year. These changes can range from minor tweaks to fundamental re-designs.

Does this mean that you need to change your plans to be consistent with prevailing best practices? Absolutely not.

Statistics aside, the real question is: "When should you change your sales compensation plans?"

The answer is whenever your corporate objectives, selling strategies or selling environment have changed such that the existing sales compensation structure is no longer aligned. Yes, in other words, it always comes back to alignment, a fundamental requirement of effective sales compensation (note the title of this newsletter!).

With this in mind, the logical place to start is the annual business planning process. After all, this is the exercise that defines broader corporate objectives and priorities, along with sales and marketing strategies and the associated performance metrics, organizational structures, deployment models and role definitions. In other words, it provides the context within which the sales compensation plan will operate.

Once the results of your annual business planning process are known, it's then time to look for areas of misalignment or inconsistency in your existing plans, and to make any required changes. For instance, if you are transitioning your Major Account Managers to a "solution selling" orientation, a sales compensation plan based on individual product lines may not make sense. Instead, an aggregate profitability metric is likely better suited to this new selling model.

Or better yet, forget about last year's sales compensation plan altogether and build a new one from scratch. It's the sales compensation equivalent of zero-based budgeting. This can be a very liberating experience, and helps avoid being inadvertently restricted by legacy preferences and practices.

Whatever method you use to pull the pieces together, the most important thing to remember is to position sales compensation design as an output of the business planning process (not an input!). This makes aligning sales compensation with corporate objectives as easy as connecting the dots, and significantly increases the probability of actually achieving those objectives.

Importantly, this approach also removes much of the contention associated with changes to sales compensation. When salespeople see that changes, whether large or small, are clearly connected to a new corporate direction or sales strategies, push back is minimized. And, assuming you haven't reduced their earning potential (cynically or otherwise), good salespeople will quickly embrace the new structure and start focusing their energies on where they should be focused - on the process of selling.

Change is not a bad thing. Just be sure to do it for the right reasons.

ZipRealty, a leading national real estate brokerage operating in 34 major markets in 19 states and the District of Columbia, has selected Centive Compel to automate sales compensation for their network of ZipAgents.

As one of the nations fastest growing real estate brokerages, ZipRealty, Inc. provides its clients an innovative on-line solution for buying and selling homes, researching local markets and finding local agents. ZipRealty's licensed employee ZipAgents offer years of experience in their local communities, and provide customers with professional, personalized service backed by guaranteed client satisfaction.